Thursday, September 18, 2014

fictionable world

“Life's
nonsense pierces us with strange relation.” This is one of the wonderful lines
in Wallace Stevens “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” – a poem that makes much of
that “toward”, that motion which, seemingly, is oriented towards an endpoint
that is itself on an absolute scale – it is supreme – and at the same time –
being “a supreme fiction” – seemingly,
diminishingly, not the only one, leaving us rather puzzled about the entire
movement and meaning that will be convened in the poem’s sweep.

I am thinking about this poem in relation to
Michael Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. The book gestures a lot to
Empson, since it is made up of Wood’s Empson Lectures given at Cambridge.
Levi-Strauss once said that totem’s are good to think with, and one could say
the same for this book: it is in that way evidently totemic. Like a good totem
pole, it mounts one head on another, beginning with Henry James and ending with
John Banville – it is mostly novelists –
and so we have can think of the tradition that is being performed. But there is
also the strange notion of the taste of knowledge. Wood procedes to mutilate or distort the idea of
knowledge until we give up our simple idea that we know what knowing is, and
take another look.

It is a
book that quotes philosophers, but isn’t philosophy – rather, it is at the
crossroads of philosophy and literature, which is not a spot haunted by many
philosophers, unfortunately.

But here’s
the thing I latched onto in reading Wood’s book – the idea of fictionable
worlds. The lovely phrase comes originally from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, where
it is a play on the fashionable world. Wood sees the immense idea that could be
here, and how it helps us to think about fiction by asking whether there could
be a world without fiction. How could a world actively resist its
fictionability? Perhaps this is the melancholic idea behind Adorno’s famous
phrase about there being no more poetry after Auschwitz. There is a point in which the fictionable
impulse dies.

That at
least is one possible reading of the limits of the fictionable world. However, realistically,
there has been poetry after Auschwitz,
and there have even been novels about Auschwitz.

So lets
find another point of entry to the fictionable world, one that Wood doesn’t
deal with, even as he intimates the direction I want to go in. That point of
entry is the error, the mistake, the misperception.

The comedy
of errors is, in Shakespeare, essential to comedy at all. Without mistakes of
identity, disguises, mishearings and
misinterpretations – think of Malvolio, for instance - there would be no comedic business.

Two of the
great novelists of the twentieth century – Nabokov and Queneau – are specialists
in the mistake. Pnin, for instance, is wound around a mistake that is signaled
at the very beginning of the book by the omniscient and ominous narrator – Pnin
is on the wrong train. From whence he proceeds to the wrong bus. Queneau, in
Chiendent, sets the plot in motion with a mistaken inference by the terrible
Madame Cloche, who thinks that Pierre Le Grand and Etienne Marcel are planning
to rob pere Taupe. This misunderstanding has many levels. It derives from a
misunderstanding of a phrase that Cloche overheard; and it leads her to infer
that Pere Taupe, contrary to his appearance as a miserable quasi-bum, is
actually a mythical miser.

If the
world and logic were one and the same thing, these errors would cancel themselves
out. They couldn’t cause anything, because they wouldn’t have any substance.
From the moment that we see that logic and the world are two separate things,
we see how the world is fictionable. We
see the work of error, we see how it blooms in the world. Michael Wood touches
briefly on a question that was once vexatious – what use is art, or how can art
be useful – to get to the question of how literature knows things. This
locution – taking an object that is known and making it a knower, as in such
book titles as “what buildings know” or “what poems know”, etc., is a contemporary
fashion that, I can’t help but think, was helped along by the fact that
computers, which we all use, seem to do things like knowing. In the early
modern era, the displacement of knowing from the consciousness to the object
was a principle in alchemy and, in general, occult knowledge. Even then, the
fact that a place “has a memory” – a theory of Cornelius Agrippa – was not
attributed, ultimately, to the place, but rather to spirits. The question of the cognitive function of
literature is, though, a bastard continuation of the great aesthetic debate
between the old purists, the high modernists, for whom literature was
autonomous and removed from the world of use, and the counter-modernists, the
realists (socialist and otherwise), for whom literature was a means to an end –
usually consciousness raising, sometimes outrage, sometimes pointing out a
social ill.

That
debate, while it is no longer conducted on the lofty, Adorno-ian plane, is
still definitely around. My own tastes are mostly for the high modern
monuments, but I don’t think my tastes encompass all literature, and it is easy
to see how a literary work could also be
didactically important, or raise consciousness, etc.

We could
look at this another way by using elements of Victor Turner’s idea of “ritual process”,
and in particular the ideas of anti-structure and liminality. Turner writes of
these things under the general notion of communitas – a non-structured,
non-hierarchical gathering that inevitably hardens into organization. But I think of this non-structured thrusting
of the liminal as something larger than communitas. It is, in fact, the
fictionable world, the world in which mistakes actually produce ontologically
real events – in which the nothing of falsehood is a cause. The world in which
we pretend logic and the world are identical bears a name: the serious world.
But the world in which logic and the world suddenly separate is harder to name.
It is the ludicrous world. It can be terrible, or terribly funny, or both.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.